Democrats are shut out of power in Washington, D.C., but they hope that doesn’t last long. Historically speaking, the midterm elections offer an opportunity to rein in a political party that controls the elected branches of the federal government.

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That currently describes Republicans under President Donald Trump. Democrats earnestly believe they can make next year’s elections a referendum on Trump — and even more so, fellow billionaire and chief government-cutter Elon Musk — and win back Congress while perhaps avoiding an extensive rebranding campaign in the wake of their 2024 losses.

History notwithstanding, that may be easier said than done. While Republicans have only the narrowest of majorities in the House, they currently hold 53 Senate seats, most of them in relatively safe red states, and next year’s map for the upper chamber is in their favor. 

Yes, Democrats only have to defend 13 Senate seats next year to the Republicans’ 22, but Republicans are trying to hold a seat in just one state carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. Democrats are trying to retain two seats in states won by Trump last year, plus five more where Harris had a single-digit margin of victory. Democratic incumbents are retiring in three of those seven states.

The Democrats’ top pickup opportunities are probably in Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), first elected in 1996, won her 2020 reelection bid by 8.6 percentage points even as future President Joe Biden carried the state by 9.1 points, and North Carolina. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has won two competitive senatorial elections in this battleground state, defeating North Carolina’s last incumbent Democratic senator in 2014. Trump took North Carolina by single-digit margins in the last three presidential elections. No Democratic nominee for the White House has prevailed there since Barack Obama in 2008.

Consequently, things are not quite as bad for Senate Democrats as they were last year, but they are bad enough that Republicans could hold the Senate even if there is a Democratic wave election next year. That’s what happened in Trump’s first midterm election, back in 2018, when Democrats captured the House but lost red-state Senate races. Progressives have complained that the Senate is structurally biased in favor of Republicans, like the Electoral College. 

Other Democrats make more modest claims. Top Democratic data scientist David Shor said in his 2024 election postmortem that “something has to change in order for us to have a majority that’s capable of securing the Senate.”

Republicans hope to unseat Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), especially if Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) decides to run. Republicans were able to force a runoff against Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) in 2022 with a flawed candidate in retired football star Herschel Walker. Warnock and Ossoff won their seats in early 2021 runoffs after Trump lost Georgia and the presidency. Trump won the state and the White House back last year.

Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI), Tina Smith (D-MN), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) are retiring. None of these races would be a shoo-in for Republicans. Michigan was the only one of these states Trump won last year, and even that wasn’t enough to deliver the state’s other Senate seat to the GOP column. Winning these seats without Trump on the ballot but with anti-Trump voters presumably flooding to the polls would be challenging.

Nevertheless, Democrats would be forced to spend money and play defense in all of these states as long as there were competent Republican Senate nominees. If the national mood is less uniformly Democratic, or at least anti-Trump, it’s possible these races would become more winnable. Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, could by himself put the Granite State’s seat in play. In the worst-case scenario, Democrats would have to pour millions of dollars into the race, as they did in Maryland last year when former Gov. Larry Hogan ran for Senate. 

There are a few things Democrats could do to try to expand the map. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who was defeated last year, is said to be eyeing a comeback run in 2026. He lost to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) in part because Trump, who won statewide by double digits, was on the ballot. Brown would presumably be a formidable candidate if he decided to run. Former Rep. Tim Ryan ran a competitive race for that seat against JD Vance, now the vice president, in 2022. But if the election is suitably nationalized, this might be a stretch. 

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is the big GOP retirement this cycle. There is likely to be a competitive primary to replace him after his nearly 42 years in the Senate. But if Ohio is now a red state at the federal level, Kentucky makes it look purple by comparison. Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) would be the top Democratic recruit to make it a race. But political heterodoxies states are willing to overlook in their governors aren’t always accepted in Senate candidates (Mitt Romney was governor of deep-blue Massachusetts but had to move to Utah to be elected to the Senate).

Perhaps even more importantly, Beshear is a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Short-timers have abandoned the Senate for higher office before, but this would be an especially quick turnaround that might work against him. And that is assuming he won. A loss would damage his presidential prospects. Beshear would also have to take positions to win a Senate seat in Kentucky that would hurt him in a national Democratic primary. He is already taking potshots at Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) for cozying up to conservatives in a possible sign he knows that as a Democratic presidential contender, he would need to run to the left in the primary, at least.

We don’t know yet what the political climate will look like, nationally or in the battleground states. The Trump administration is moving quickly, as if it realizes its opportunities might be limited after the midterm elections (this also suggests that despite Democratic fearmongering to the contrary, it is preparing for Trump to become a lame-duck president sometime in 2027).

It is easy to imagine voters deciding they don’t like the pace of change under Trump, even if they are broadly sympathetic to some of his policy goals. They could also react negatively to the implementation of specific things, such as the Department of Government Efficiency and tariffs. The early dips in the stock market as the second Trump administration started to take shape might only have been the beginning of wider economic problems.

If the public has turned on Trump by then — and there are bright red warning signs that voters don’t think he is focused enough on inflation and the economic concerns that helped return him to office — Democrats won’t necessarily have to reinvent themselves. In a two-party system, they will be the only viable alternative. And it is possible to vote for a divided government without fully embracing Democratic progressivism. 

After Obama was elected, Republicans largely ignored their after-action reports and the advice of their leading strategists. Some winnable races were surely lost as a result, and a persistent governing problem has remained unresolved. But when the public got tired of Obama, there was nowhere else to turn. The tea party won Congress in 2010 and 2014, overthrowing Democratic supermajorities in the process. Trump was elected to his first term in 2016 and has been the ultimate political survivor ever since, though he did represent a shift in the party’s approach in ways the infamous GOP autopsy never anticipated.

Democrats may be similarly able to recover despite their flawed leaders and penchant for taking the wrong side of 80-20 issues in public opinion, simply by being the only Plan B available whenever Trump finally wears out his welcome as he has done, however temporarily, once before. But the Democrats’ favorability ratings are low, and the party doesn’t seem ready for its Clintonian pivot to the center. Perhaps the bottom never truly drops out for Trump with DOGE and the tariffs. The hard economic data so far look more promising than consumer and business confidence, though it should be remembered that Biden-Harris team members tried to assure each other that inflation-induced anxieties were just passing “vibes,” as transitory as they initially claimed inflation itself was. 

Suffice it to say, however, that it is not yet clear whether the town hall protests, Tesla-bashing, and big rallies for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are a sign of huge progressive energy or a get-out-the-vote driver for conservatives. 

Or both. There is also the possibility of a split verdict. So far, 2018 has been the last wave election. It was largely a blue one. Democrats gained 41 House seats and the majority. But they experienced a net loss of two Senate seats as Republicans held their majority there, thanks to a conservative backlash against the Democrats in the redder states that were up for election that year. If the battleground states vote to the right of the country as a whole, that could happen again, even if the Resistance comes into play.

The Senate hasn’t always been bad news for Democrats, however, and the battleground states haven’t always voted to the right of the national electorate. “In 2020, we won basically every competitive Senate race,” Shor said of Democrats in his recent postmortem. “And in both 2022 and 2024, we saw something that I had never seen before, which is that we did a lot better in swing Senate races than we did nationally.”

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“But a lot of that was the other side running terrible candidates,” he added. “And we can’t count on that happening forever. And even despite that — even despite historically well-run campaigns and historically weak opposition — here we are four years later at 47 Senate seats and with a very difficult path to getting back to 50 even in a wave Democratic year.”

Even if a lot goes wrong for Trump in the next 19 months, Democratic Senate candidates will need quite a lot to go right.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.